[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Reaganwuzthebest,

All the points you make are good ones, and really analogize to the situation when banks "find" money left over from depositors who forgot about their account. They are then obligated to take out ads in newspapers and disclose all the money they found before it gets disposed of one way or another. Or like how the Feds write in little fine print all the guns and cars they've seized in the "war on drugs". Or how various commercial concerns are required to publish various disclosures in the backs of papers. These things are published because they are required, not because they think anyone is going to actually read them. In fact the people who run the ads are hoping that nobody does read them.

However, the key difference here is the word "required". In the case at hand, Time magazine was under no obligation to publish what they published. They could just as well have not run the story at all. There is no law that says when JFK tells Hugh Sidey something, that Time is obligated to print it within some amount of time (no pun). So your arguments are interesting but they don't address the issue of why TIME ran the story at all.

[Reaganwuzthebest]

The writing of the story was by Russ Kick, in case you though it was me.

As to TIME publishing it, I wonder if they would do it today if the same situation presented itself. Back then journalists weren't as quick to print everything a politician told them. A story like this could cause tremendous panic, but then you would want to get the city evacuated. Tough call.